Filtered & Refined: Interfaces for Distilling Data

We live in an information economy. Companies make it their business to put large sets of data in the hands of consumers. Whether shopping for a bargain flight, searching for a book at the local library, or browsing through potential matches on a dating site, we encounter great quantities of information that must be organized, sorted, and filtered.

It is our job as designers to dissect this information and create intuitive and interactive interfaces that allow people to easily create queries, compare multiple items, and drill down through lists of results to find the perfect product. Whether your data happens to be people, places, or things, we’ll examine case studies from my own work, and we’ll cover the appropriate user controls and design patterns for working with diverse types sets of data.